We have seen that there is an ongoing need in the retail industry to become more specific in understanding shrinkage at individual locations or within geographical areas. The National Shrink Database will allow its membership to look at actual information on both a global scale as well as hone in on individual locations, areas and retail segments to best measure themselves against the industry.

Both organizations have created this database in efforts to support the needs of the industry. What started as an individual project has become an industry project with the goal of providing actual and accurate information to support the retail industry. CAP Index is the developers and custodians of the data, database, models, analyses through their expertise in handling sensitive data and developing excellent analytical results. LP Innovations is the sponsor and industry related experts of the project and will be providing the industry marketing, support and promotion of the database.

A retailer’s individual data is and will not be made available to anyone other than CAP Index for the integration of the data into the database. The individual data itself is protected in a secure hosted environment with no access from anyone other than CAP Index to support the database. Access to the database will be dependent on the role the retailer plays in the database. Retailers contributing data will have complete access, whereas non-contributing retailers will have limited access. We are also discussing with the retail industry the possibility of allowing non-retailers certain access for research purposes.

The strength and future of this database relies on the information provided by the retail membership. For the National Shrink Database to be accurate, it requires timely and accurate information from the retail community. Our expectation is that the retail membership will provide information at least once annually to support the shrinkage and security measure results.

No. The National Shrink Database is focusing on providing statistical information that allows retailers to benchmark themselves against retail segments and geographical locations. It is not reporting on incidents related to those provided by LERPNet or other incident reporting databases.

A retailer can sign up as a contributing member and we will work with them to provide a file of the necessary information to contribute their data to the database. Additionally, the contributing member will be provided access to the database to support their research needs. Retailers who want to join but not support the database by providing data will be given access at an annual fee and will have access to certain parts of the database.

It is our goal to provide access to the database to contributing members at no annual cost other than a data implementation fee. Access to the database is planned to be at no additional cost for a certain number of users. Non-contributing retailers will have an annual fee based on number of user access licenses.